Her father was a staunch segregationist, her mother was his family's teenage black maid: Daughter of a notorious liaison dies aged 87

The mixed-race daughter, who her segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond never publicly acknowledged, has died at the age of 87.

Thurmond made a name for himself as a staunch Republican that was against the integration of black and white Americans, and he died at the age of 100 without ever announcing that he had fathered the half-black woman named Essie Mae Washington-Williams.

She was born in 1925 after Thurmond,
then 22, had an affair with a 16-year-old black maid who worked in his
family's Edgefield, South Carolina home.

It was only after he died in 2003 that Ms Washington-Williams came forward and disclosed her lineage.

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Passed away: Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who revealed in 2003 that she was the daughter of segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, died today in South Carolina

The identity of her famous father was rumored for decades in political circles and the black community.

She later said she kept his secret because, 'He trusted me, and I respected him.'

He served in the Senate for 47-years before his death, and lost a presidential bid which he ran on a segregationist platform.

'I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams,
and at last I am completely free,' Washington-Williams said at a news
conference revealing her secret.

She spent years as a school teacher in Los Angeles, keeping in touch with her famous father.

While Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his daughter, his family acknowledged her claim after she came forward.

Secrets: Senator Strom Thurman fathered a biracial daughter with a teenage maid at his parents' home in 1925

She later said Thurmond's widow,
Nancy, was 'a very wonderful person,' and called Strom Thurmond Jr.
'very caring, and interested in what's going on with me.'

Paul
Thurmond, a South Carolina state senator and son of Strom Thurmond,
said in an email to The Associated Press, 'I was sorry to hear of the
passing of Ms. Washington-Williams. She was kind and gracious and I have
the greatest respect for her, her life and her legacy.'

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Washington-Williams was raised by Mary and John Washington in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.

When she was 13, Mary Washington's sister, Carrie Butler, told Essie Mae that she was her mother.

In the shadows no more: Washington-Williams revealed that Thurmond paid for her education and kept in touch with her throughout his life

Washington-Williams met Thurmond for the first time a few years later in a law office in Thurmond's hometown of Edgefield.

'He
never called my mother by her name. He didn't verbally acknowledge that
I was his child,' Washington-Williams wrote in her autobiography, 'Dear
Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.'

'He didn't ask when I was leaving and didn't invite me to come back. It was like an audience with an important man, a job interview, but not a reunion with a father,' she said in the book released January 2005.

One he did acknowledge: Thurmond, seen giving a piggyback ride to his daughter Nancy in 1973, had four white children in addition to Essie Mae

Long career: Thurmond began his career as a Southern Democrat, but then switched to be a staunch member of the Republican party (seen left with President Nixon in 1968 and right with President Eisenhower in 1954)

It was the first of many visits between Washington-Williams and her father.

He supported her, paying for her to attend then-South Carolina State College at the same time Thurmond was governor.

He also helped her later after she was widowed in the 1960s.

'It's not that Strom Thurmond ever swore me to secrecy. He never swore me to anything,' she wrote.

'He trusted me, and I respected him, and we loved each other in our deeply repressed ways, and that was our social contract.'

Big occasion: Though Thurmond, pictured on his 100th birthday party with President Bush, never acknowledged his love child publicly, his family did

Washington-Williams watched from afar as Thurmond ran for president as a segregationist for the Dixiecrat Party in 1948, saying 'all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro race into our theaters, our swimming pools, our schools, our churches, our homes.'

Revelations: Essie Mae Washington-Williams published a memoir about her relationship with her father which she kept a secret until his death

Washington-Williams recalled once asking her father about race.

Thurmond defended his beliefs as part of the 'culture and custom of the South,' she wrote.

'I certainly never did like the idea that he was a segregationist, but there was nothing I could do about it,' Washington-Williams said in 2003.

'That was his life.'

Thurmond later softened his political stance and renounced racism, but never enough to claim paternity.

Thurmond and his first wife, Jean, were married in 1947; she died in 1960. They had no children. He had four children with his second wife, the former Nancy Moore, whom he married in 1968.

Washington-Williams was left unsettled by her father's death. At her daughter's encouragement she decided to make her story public.

'In a way, my life began at 78, at least my life as who I really was,' Washington-Williams wrote.

'I may have called it `closure,' but it was much more like an opening, a very grand opening.'

A statue of Thurmond on the Statehouse lawn was originally cast saying he had four children. Thurmond's family agreed to have Washington-Williams' name added.